


pink like the lid of your eye

by jk_rockin



Series: JK's terror.exe flash fest fills [1]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Watercolours
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:21:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26149369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jk_rockin/pseuds/jk_rockin
Summary: James was working in the new sketchbook, cadged from one of the Enterprise officers of a similarly artistic bent. His previous lay on the table behind his elbow. Idly, Francis flipped it open. The early pages were all pencil sketches, such as he’d seen James do before; a few charcoals, in the middle, which were getting awfully smudged. Towards the back were the paintings. Here was the Terror, wedged skew-whiff in the ice. Here was an ice shelf in layers of green and blue. Here were the tents out on the shale in their orderly rows. Francis flicked by these, nauseous with memories of all they did not show.A splash of vibrant pink was visible on the edge of a page which stuck out a little from the others. Francis turned to it, and stopped still.For the terror.exe flash fic fest, from the prompt:Tell us about watercolours, why don't you, James?
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Series: JK's terror.exe flash fest fills [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1899301
Comments: 46
Kudos: 112
Collections: @terror_exe Flash Fest





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi hello yes I like this show a normal amount. My feelings about emotionally repressed sea captains are very moderate and appropriately regulated. Title from Janelle Monáe's _Pynk_ , even though this vignette is not about vaginas at all.

“I thought you were a pencil man,” said Francis, glancing over James’s shoulder.

“Oh, primarily, but I found the box in the crates from _Erebus_ , and thought I’d have a crack at them,” said James. “Keeping the water from freezing is the very devil, but the effect can be striking.”

On the page, the aurora flowed in ribbons of pale violet and green. Francis was thoroughly sick of the aurora, himself, but James had rendered it beautifully. “Nice view,” he offered.

James paused. “Thank you,” he said, softly.

Francis ambled around the great cabin. Kind of Ross to let him and James doss down in here; even with all the men they’d lost before the rescue had come, _Enterprise_ was fairly bursting at the mainstays with her crew and the survivors aboard, and Francis wouldn’t turn a man out of his berth. James had been offered one, and he and Francis had come near to blows over James’s refusal- he was still sick, and needed rest, not to be cheek by jowl with an old fusspot like Francis while he was trying to get well again.

It was good that he was occupying himself. Francis, never much given to hobbies, felt very much at a loose end. Ross, bless him, wouldn’t let him do a lick of work worth doing, so when he wasn’t out on deck, watching the sea, he was following James around, watching him sketch or write or, now, paint.

The watercolours didn’t really suit James. Too- oh, blast, it was probably a pun- wishy washy. Regardless, he’d turned out any number of Arctic views, like a maiden aunt memorialising a walking tour through the Lakes District. Francis could not bring himself to like them. Very pretty, to be sure, but too pretty- too clean. The Admiralty were probably going to exhibit the bloody things, when they got home.

James was working in the new sketchbook, cadged from one of the Enterprise officers of a similarly artistic bent. His previous lay on the table behind his elbow. Idly, Francis flipped it open. The early pages were all pencil sketches, such as he’d seen James do before; a few charcoals, in the middle, which were getting awfully smudged. Towards the back were the paintings. Here was the Terror, wedged skew-whiff in the ice. Here was an ice shelf in layers of green and blue. Here were the tents out on the shale in their orderly rows. Francis flicked by these, nauseous with memories of all they did not show.

A splash of vibrant pink was visible on the edge of a page which stuck out a little from the others. Francis turned to it, and stopped still.

Quite a lot of pink, was his first thought. Nothing they’d seen out on the pack had been that pink. The details of the painting came to him slowly, one by one. Here was a leg, and there an arm, and a thatch of straw-coloured hair on a round head. He turned the page again. Another pink and tan study, this one posed in a narrow bunk, like a ship’s berth. The shapes around the very pink central image were vague, but Francis thought he could make out shelves very like those in his own berth on Terror.

The next page was similar. About a dozen were, in fact, similar. All nudes, all in shades of pink from pale rose to vivid strawberry, and all of Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, R.N., in attitudes he might reasonably have struck, albeit typically more thoroughly clothed.

Had he ever looked like this? Francis had been in the habit of avoiding looking-glasses for most of his adult life, finding gazing upon his own visage more a chore than anything else. He knew he went red at the slightest provocation, which he had long taken as something of a weakness, but the man in these paintings did not look weak; he looked strong, vital, and more at ease than he’d ever felt in himself.

This was how James saw him. The thought was a thunderclap. After all they’d been to each other, after all the ways Francis had failed to keep him safe, this was the figure of him James saw behind his eyes. He’d heard the term ‘lovingly rendered’ before; perhaps that was what this was.

James coughed.

“You’ll run out of pink, at this rate,” said Francis.

James blinked up at him. On the open page of his new book, he’d added tints of vivid, gas-flame blue. “Watercolours are quite economical,” he said, diffidently, though the story his face told was not one of diffidence at all.

Francis turned back a page, to the one of himself posed in the copper bathtub, with a leg slung over the side. The painted Francis’s head was tipped back, eyes closed, his modesty preserved by delicate wisps of steam. “I do not recall sitting for these,” Francis said.

“When one looks at a man long enough, even fully dressed, it is possible to obtain a reasonable idea of his shape,” said James. He looked right at Francis as he said it, right at his eyes, as if to make sure Francis took his meaning.

Francis did. “Well you may say,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’ve let your imagination carry you away, my lad. I’ve not shown a leg like that since I was a middy.”

James gave him one of those long, searching looks, from his face down to the toes of his boots, and back up again. “For accuracy, it is better to have a living model,” he said.

“I’m not taking my clothes off in Ross’s great cabin in the middle of the afternoon,” said Francis. “A man likes to be warm. I warrant I’ll not lose so much as my neckerchief without a roaring fire and a cup of tea on standby.”

The smile that played around James’s mouth was a small thing, fragile, but lovely; much lovelier, in Francis’s eyes, than a hundred paintings of ice shelves, and it warmed him through, so that he might have gone on deck in naught but a fig leaf and not minded it. “My brother’s house in Brighton has a guest wing with some very nice fireplaces, I’m told,” James said.

Francis put a hand on James’s shoulder, and James reached up to clasp it. Alive, alive, and there were fireplaces waiting for them, back over the Greenland sea. “And the cup of tea, mind,” he said.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A month ago, a kind anon asked if I would write a follow up to this story where James did actually do the nude studies as promised; I did not really do that. Instead, here is 1,000 words of self-consciousness and romantic uncertainty, and much more dialogue than any fic needs.

“Francis,” said James. “I am not painting a blanket.”

“Perfectly good blanket,” said Francis. He picked at a loose thread on one hem.

James sighed. "Really, now. I've stoked the fire, I've drawn the curtains- even though the light will be entirely inadequate- and we've the house to ourselves for hours. Stop being silly."

“Haven’t you got enough of your dirty sketches to be going on with?” Francis said.

“They’re _artistic_ ,” said James primly. “And they’re not as good as they could be, with a proper model."

“James, you’ve seen… all this,” said Francis. The gesture he made to indicate his person was somewhat concealed by the blanket, still clenched in his hands. “Hardly a Greek statue, am I.”

Entirely failing to suppress a smirk, James’s gaze flicked down Francis’s shrouded body, to the join of his thighs, where the blanket failed to entirely hide his legs. “Oh, hardly,” he said.

When Francis huffed again, James stood up, and crossed the room to where Francis stood hovering in the doorway. “Forgive an old coward,” Francis said. “I thought myself brave enough for this, but-”

“Am I so terrifying, then?” James put his hands on Francis’s shoulders, feeling him shift beneath the soft wool.

"You scare me to death," said Francis earnestly. "Look at you. Half my age, and even bloody starving and scurvy-ridden you were- you _are_ \- so beautiful I can hardly stand to look at you. I’ve no idea what you want with me, James."

"Francis," said James softly.

"Even when we were rescued, on the way home I thought, well, he wants distracting, I can give him that," Francis continued, words bubbling out of him like froth from the mouth of an uncorked bottle. "I can have him for a little while. He'll grow tired of me soon enough."

"Never," James interjected.

Francis’s mouth quirked. "But then we came home, and you kept on…" He trailed off, toying with the blanket again. "I've been expecting my marching orders every day since we got here, and now I'm in the altogether in the sitting room of your brother's house." He squeezed his eyes shut. "And I find myself thinking, Frank, you fool, if he gets a decent look at what he's thrown in with in the cold light of day, he'll have you out of the house by teatime.”

While the sentiment was ridiculous- they had been sharing a bed, and more besides, for long enough that James had a much clearer idea of Francis’s body than he had when he first took up a pencil to sketch out what he had, then, only imagined- hearing it said, a number of other things suddenly became clear. Why Francis would not let James keep a lamp burning when they went to that shared bed together; why he had yet to completely unpack, though he had voiced no intention of going anywhere anytime soon; why he maintained the polite fiction that he slept on the settee in their room rather than in their bed so assiduously.

James had wondered if, perhaps, Francis had had a foot out the door, or his eye on the horizon. Looking back at it in a different light, he could see these behaviours for what they were; a man unsure of his welcome, waiting to be dismissed.

"You are a fool," said James firmly. He touched Francis’s cheek, tipping his face up so that, when Francis opened his eyes again, they were eye to eye. "I do not mean to be parted from you, Francis. Not now, nor ten years from now. Not when every hair has dropped off your head and you wrinkle up like a prune."

"A very romantic prospect," said Francis, in a somewhat watery tone.

"Decidedly romantic." He slipped a thumb beneath the edge of the blanket, stroking over the jut of collarbone- still more prominent than James thinks right; he must have a word to Mrs Miller, William's excellent cook, on the topic of cream sauces- and feeling Francis's pulse beating in his throat. "You'll make a very handsome prune," he said.

That shook a laugh out of him, at least, and he did not protest when James pressed closer, letting himself be held as he did not often allow while awake. Perhaps that, too, was a symptom of his uncertainty in James’s fidelity. He had a way about him, Francis, of rationing his joys, that James intended to set about spoiling him out of as soon as could be managed.

“I had the fortune to see some rather good Japanese prints in Zhenjiang,” he said, against Francis’s temple. “Woodcuts. Mostly landscapes, nature views and so on, but portraits, too. There were some very fetching ones of famous beauties, some of them with their robes down about their elbows, exposing their shoulders."

"Scandalous," said Francis. His nose pressed into James’s neck, warm breath spreading through the layers of cravat and collar.

“Quite. I was very taken with them. I don’t know that I could emulate the style,” James said, sliding his right hand, which had been clasped around Francis’s neck, underneath the blanket to spread his fingers over a warm shoulder blade. “I think I could make a decent fist of the subject matter, though.”

“Of all the things on Earth I do not resemble, the only thing I am further away from than your Greek fellows with nothing on but their fig leaves is a _Japanese beauty_ ,” Francis grumbled. He did not, however, hike the blanket back up, or attempt to move James’s hand.

Smiling, James took a step backward, and then another, guiding the reluctant Francis into the room, and steering him towards the settee. “Perhaps we could reach a compromise,” he said. “You may keep your blanket, if I may open the curtains. It really is too dark in here, and I should hate to miss your finer details.”

Francis laughed again, a firmer, more certain sound, and sat down, drawing the blanket tighter about his middle, which, delightfully, pulled it down at the top by several inches. “I know your game,” he said. “You mean to wear me down.”

No, James thought. No, I mean to build you up. I mean to wedge myself into your foundations and build us two into one whole. “You’ve seen through my cunning ruse,” he said, and went to the windows to let in more light.

**Author's Note:**

> Please come and scream about icy lads with me [on tumblr](https://jkrockin.tumblr.com/) or [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/jk_rockin).


End file.
